1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medicine packaging machine for packaging medicines (medicines dispensed on the basis of a doctor's prescription) with a medicine packaging sheet every given dose in a hospital, a pharmacy or the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
When a patient is given a dose of medicines dispensed according to a prescription, medicines required for a dose are packaged into the same separate package (packaged bag) and dosed to the patient by an automatic medicine packaging machine or the like so that the patient can be avoided from mixing different medicines and taking these medicines (tablets or the like) by himself or herself. The medicine packaging sheet used for these separate packages (packaged bags) is sealed by thermal adhesion (welding) after medicines are put into the medicine packaging sheet, whereby many separate packages are formed as a train of linked medicine packages (see JP-A-2004-189315). This train of medicine packages are cut at predetermined positions by a cutting mechanism, and each of the separate medicine packages thus cut is supplied to each patient (see JP-A-05-132007).
However, the thermally welded medicine packaging sheet has the following problems. That is, it is difficult for a patient to cut out the welded portion when the patient unseals (breaks the seal of) the medicine packaging sheet, and also the patient may drop the medicines from the medicine packaging sheet when breaking the seal.
Furthermore, there is a method of forming a packaging sheet by using an element which is subjected to cut processing so that the side edge portion thereof is corrugated. In this case, however, the corrugated portion of the packaging sheet is also hard to be cut out for aged persons who cannot strongly pinch the packaging sheet, and also the corrugation cut processing increases the manufacturing cost.
In the conventional cutting mechanism described above, a cutter blade for cutting a medicine packaging sheet operates like sawing. Therefore, the conventional cutting mechanism has a problem that the cutting mechanism portion must be designed in a large scale and thus the installation space thereof is large.